This disclosure is related to sensors and, more particularly, sensors featuring molecularly imprinted polymers.
Sensors capable of detecting specific chemical agents such as proteins have application in a number of areas including chemical or pharmaceutical process monitoring, environmental surveillance, early stage cancer detection, anti-biowarfare detections, explosive detection, real time biological detections in vivo or in vitro, etc. In typical applications, it is desirable that the sensor be able to identify the presence of a specific target molecule in real time and with high sensitivity.
Molecular imprinting is a technique to create template-shaped cavities in a material, e.g. a polymer. The cavities act as a “memory” of the template molecules, and so may be used in molecular recognition. Molecularly imprinted materials are typically prepared using a template molecule and functional monomers that assemble around the template and subsequently get cross linked to each other. The functional monomers, which are self-assembled around the template molecule by interaction between functional groups on both the template and monomers, are polymerized to form an imprinted matrix (commonly known as a molecularly imprinted polymer or “MIP”). Then the template molecule is removed from the matrix under certain conditions, leaving behind a cavity complementary in size and shape to the template. The obtained cavity can work as a selective binding site for a specific target molecule.